erasure-athon

ERASUREATHON

Make erasure poetry out of other people's fanfiction for gold and glory! Or just glory.


WHAT

Erasure poetry is made when the poet selects a written work, removes parts, and what is left is the poem. It’s an excavation, an unfolding, a division, a recreation, a transformation. Your final product can be radically different from your original source – in fact it is bound to. Its final form can look like anything you want it to – Jan Bervin leaves all the text visible but makes the “erased” parts grey (an example is in the Radi Os link below), Ronald Johnson visually erases text entirely and leaves the gaps where they are so that the poem is made of words that float on the page, Tom Phillips paints art over the erased portions and leaves the text circled in little rivers that direct the flow of the reading.


SEE

Radi Os, Ronald Johnson’s erasure of the first four books of Paradise Lost
See the first page

A Humument, Tom Phillips’ erasure of the Victorian novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, has seen four editions and over half its pages recreated since Phillips started the project 30+ years ago
The official website – contains images of all the pages from the first edition (1970-75), and a slide show of the entire fourth edition (2005)

fanfiction erasures:
erasureathon


ERASURE RULES

1) There are no rules. This is a crazy art form; any ideas of “writing” are meant to be flouted.
2) Well, there is sort of one unwritten rule, and that is: don’t add your own letters or words. Stick with what the text gives you.



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